B-Movie Central Cheese Blog

You know, it’s funny.  Sometimes in life we have dreams of wanting certain things, and after years of longing for them, we finally get them and they just don’t meet up to our expectations.  It’s really depressing and you just end up feeling let down.  This just recently happened to me.  See, I was always a huge, even fanatical fan of the band Queen.  Hell, I even met my wife of almost 15 years now because of Queen, as she was a fan of them as well.  For years, ever since the first copies of the Red Special came out from Guild, I’ve really wanted a Brian May Red Special guitar.  Recently, Musician’s Friend had a sale, and the Red Special from Brian May Guitars was included in the sale, so I jumped at the chance to finally get something that I’ve wanted for so many years, and I just knew that since Brian had taken over the company that produced the guitars, that it would be just awesome!

So the guitar finally came.  With great anticipation I opened the box, and when I pulled it out, it was such a wonderful feeling.  It was beautiful, just like I had always dreamed of.  So I carefully extracted everything from the packaging and sat down to play my very own Red Special for the first time.  That’s when the nightmare began…

With eager anticipation, I sat down and plugged the Red Special into my Axe-Fx II, put on my headphones, turned it all on, and played a few notes.  When I say notes, I’m exaggerating, because the terminally horrible fret buzzing that emanated from the guitar could hardly be called notes.  It sounded more like a hive full of angry bees.  So I figured, “Ok, it just needs to go through the tuning process so the strings can stretch and the trem can float in the proper parallel position to the body.  So I tuned and re-tuned and tuned it some more….no dice.  It was then that I realized that the guitar hadn’t been set up at all.  The trem was too low, the bridge saddles weren’t adjusted properly, the neck needed a slight adjustment, etc….  Now I have been a huge fan of Schecter guitars and basses for a few years, and I have NEVER been disappointed with them.  They come right out of the box fully set up and ready to play with only minor tuning.  I don’t know if I just got spoiled or what, but getting a guitar that cost me nearly as much as a Schecter that I would have rather had under normal circumstances, and having it show up with absolutely no setup at all really disappointed me.

So I set about the task of going through the whole setup process.  Two and a half days of adjustments, trem work, neck adjustments and more re-tunings than I can count.  During this process, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed previously.  There was a small chip on the edge of the neck right next to the edge of one of the frets.  Again, I was hugely disappointed at the utter lack of quality control, but resigned myself to live with it, as my thumb didn’t generally touch it when I played, and it was only a small chip, but still, this was a brand new guitar.  It should have been flawless right out of the box.  Something else that was wrong with the guitar was that during the set up process, I noticed that the intonation on the low E string was always sharp.  I pulled the bridge saddle back as far as it would go, and it was still sharp.  Finally I had to remove the spring from it so I could pull it all the way to the back of the bridge, at which point it finally intonated exactly.  You shouldn’t have to do this.  If they had set up the guitar properly before sending it out, this would have been noticed and it wouldn’t have been sent out that way.

So anyway, I FINALLY get it all set up and adjusted, and then I notice something else.  There’s a small scuff in the finish at the lower part of the neck on the upper side.  I don’t know if it was a scuff or if it was a smudge of neck glue or what, but it once again spoke volumes about the utter lack of quality control.

As for the playability of the guitar…

While the tonal variations and clean tones were really nice, I found my distortion sounds somewhat lacking.  The passive tri-sonic pickups were much lower output than I expected and nowhere near as hot as my actives in my Schecter.  The neck was too wide to be comfortably playable unless you have monkey fingers.  More likely than not, you’ll end up pulling strings when you try to finger chords, thereby pulling them out of tune simply from your own finger tension.  The resonance created by the construction of the guitar made it so that whenever you played a string, the other strings would resonate with it to a really obnoxious degree.  Now to the trem…

The trem is a Wilkinson trem.  Not only does it refuse to stay in tune when used, it refuses to stay in tune when not used.  String bends can throw it out of whack like nothing, no matter how many trem springs are on it or how properly it’s set up.  The trem bar is literally just a slide in bar that floats loose with no way to stiffen it up, so it just swings around while you’re playing.  The biggest problem with a bar like this is that if you lean the guitar forward, the bar will fall out of the trem and onto the floor.

(Update: As I was prepping the guitar to send it back, I did notice that at the back underside of the trem, virtually invisible, is a tiny screw you can use to stiffen the trem arm, which to me is utterly worthless as it seems like it would not only cause some scratching on the arm, but it’s damn near impossible to get to without divebombing the trem and holding it down so you can access the screw.)

The guitar itself is very unbalanced.  The body is big, round and bulky, while the neck, while wider than a normal neck, is light, so the guitar is always pulling to the back end, and you feel like you’re constantly fighting with it while you’re playing.  The whole body of the guitar is round, except for the top, which has shallow “horns” for lack of a better term.  This makes it unbelievably uncomfortable to hold on your right leg while sitting down, forcing you to instead hold it on your left leg with the back of the guitar resting against your right leg for stability.

Worst of all, after all the setup work I put into it, the low E string refused to stay in tune no matter what I did.  I lubed the nut, moved the trem springs to a 3-1 configuration toward the low end, tuned and re-tuned…nothing helped.  Finally I got fed up.  I was spending more time setting this damn thing up and constantly tuning it than I was actually playing it.  At the point where I was even considering buying about $120 bucks worth of radius and feeler gauges to try to dial it all in better to see if I could work out the kinks, I finally just said to myself, “Screw this, it’s just not worth it.”

So, right now in my inbox, I have a return shipping label from Musician’s Friend.  This guitar, is going back, and I’m getting a guitar that I really wanted instead, a  Schecter C-1 FR Hellraiser.  I have a Schecter C1-FR that has some differences to the Hellraiser.  Mine has Duncan Designed Blackouts, a toggle switch and I think the Floyd Rose Licenced Locking Trem is the same design, but different than the official Floyd Rose trem in the Hellraiser in the materials it’s constructed from.  The Hellraiser has EMG 81/89TW pickups with a coil tap, a blade pickup switch rather than a toggle, and the official trem.  It also has different neck inlays and a different paint job.  I’m getting a hard shell case with it as well, and between the two, they’ll only cost about $204 more than the Red Special. My original C1-FR is more of a “rock” guitar, while the Hellraiser is more of a “metal” guitar, though truth be told, either guitar can do whatever style of music you want, from metal to jazz and everything in between.

So in the end, I’ll have a guitar that I love that comes out of the box pristine and set up perfectly, while I send a guitar that has disappointed me beyond words back where it came from.  Does Brian May know about the production and quality issues with his guitars?  I have no idea.  He may just own the company and other people do the day to day stuff, so he’s not aware of how bad these models really are.  There are higher end copies of the Red Special out there that are more authentic to the original guitar.  Maybe they’re better, I have no idea, but I really want to believe that Brian truly doesn’t know about the issues with the guitars coming from their Korean production facility.  I can’t believe he’d put his name on something that had these kinds of quality issues.  I really hope that’s the case, because if he does know, that would be just flat out wrong, and even more disappointing than the guitar itself.  Brian’s a nice guy, and a really good guy from everything I’ve seen of him over the years, and I really just don’t want to think that of him.  Still, he needs to take a close look at what’s going on with these production models, because if someone doesn’t take control of it soon, it’s only going to end up hurting his reputation.

So that’s the end of my story.  A new story will begin once I finally have my new Schecter in my hands.  A guitar I can actually spend time playing rather than one that will leave me frustrated and disappointed.

“For creating intrigue, an ambiguous statement is infinitely preferable to the straightforward one. The more intrigue created, the more frantic others become to partake of what you have to offer. For example, as a Satanist, I am sometimes asked about sex orgies by the deeply frustrated. A knowing wink will do more to get them slobbering than any amount of lurid description. It would be senseless to improve upon the explicit vistas provided by modern pornographers.” – Anton Szandor LaVey

This quote describes very closely the way I feel about modern horror.  Nowadays, so much of it is in your face and on full display in all its gory detail.  The shock value of this type of horror has become minimalized by its very prevalence.  Classic horror was defined by suspense and insinuation.  You were left to wonder what was lurking in the shadows, and when it struck, it was enough to hear the sounds of the attack without actually seeing it.  This left the viewer to concoct the horrors of these scenes in their own mind, which in turn allowed them to experience the film in a very special and unique way.  Those imagined scenes actually become a part of their own personal film experience.

Think of it like reading a book.  As you read, you create each scene in your mind, and those scenes are unique to you.  No one else will ever experience those scenes the same way as you do.  When the gore and slaughter is flashed in front of the viewer, everyone experiences it in the same way, because it was spoon fed to them.  There’s nothing left to the imagination, and nothing unique for the viewer to experience.  I long for the return of classic style horror, where the viewer becomes part of the story.  I think there are some film makers who still understand the concept of imagined terrors, so I hold out hope that we’ll see more films of the horror genre return to this style in the future.

Yep, she’s dead, and as with Michael Jackson when he died, all of a sudden everyone’s remembering what a great artist and performer she was and so sad that her life was cut short.  Excuse me while I gag.

Whitney Houston deserves neither praise nor respect.  She literally had everything anyone could possibly dream of.  Money, fame, not a care in the world, and she decided to spit in the face of everyone who dreams of having a life like that by polluting her body with drugs and throwing it all away.  It’s like, wow, drugs are bad?  Really?  Wow, I had no idea!  Anyone who puts drugs in their body after seeing how many lives and careers it’s destroyed for decades now, deserves no praise.  They deserve to be called what they are – an idiot, and an ungrateful one at that.

Look at Ted Nugent.  He managed to have a great career without drinking and without drugs.  He’s lived a long, healthy life, had bad experiences, like his first wife divorcing him and eventually dying of a drug overdose, being bankrupted by his corrupt accountants, getting re-married and divorced again, finally finding his soul mate, being in multiple band situations, touring all over the world, putting out album after album…all without drugs or alcohol.  He didn’t need them.  Why?  Because he has a strong, logical mind, and knows what drugs and alcohol abuse can do to you.  He personally saw it with Hendrix and a variety of other performers throughout his career, and he had brains enough to know that drugs and alcohol don’t lead anywhere good, and are not the way to party, handle stress or anything else.

As for Whitney, she did this to herself.  No one tied her to a chair, shoved a crack pipe in her mouth and made her smoke it.  She made the conscious decision to stick that crap in her body all on her own.  She was an adult and made the decision to do it to herself.  The funny thing about all this is, she didn’t even die of an overdose like everyone thought she would.  She took some prescription drugs and fell asleep in her hotel tub and drowned.  A fitting end to a life that had literally petered out with a sputter and a whimper, and so similar to what happened to Michael that it’s actually a bit weird, because they were both in the process of making a big comeback, and both died after taking something to help them sleep.

I’d like to think that this will serve as an object lesson to other performers out there, and maybe it will to some.  We can only hope.  Unfortunately, as long as there are idiots with too much money and easy access to drugs, there will always be tragedies like this, because your average idiot is convinced it could never happen to them, and just as with Whitney, there’ll be no tears coming out of my eyes when they roll the dice and lose.

Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer about this, but I’m sick of seeing all the posts on Facebook from people who are so sad and full of kind words about her now that she’s gone, but who didn’t spare even one second of thought to her in the past several years.  Now that she’s gone, suddenly they remembered she existed.  It happened when Michael Jackson passed as well, and I’m sick of seeing it.  She was nothing to be idolized or remembered fondly.  She was yet another life lesson and a casualty of the entertainment business that should be seen as a wake up call to others, and nothing more.  It’s fine to remember her early days, and to enjoy the music she made back when she was clean and healthy and singing her heart out.  It just irritates me that no one thought about her much after her decline into drugs, and eventually, even as she lost her home and her health and mental well being faltered, no one would even mention her name other than to talk about what a shame it was.  That’s like passing someone on the street who’s dying, shaking your head and muttering to yourself what a shame it is as you walk on by and head to your favorite restaurant for a nice meal.  Think about it.

I’m back, but where have I been?  Well, starting about the middle of December, I began going through another bout of depression, which is something that hasn’t happened to me in a very long time.  I guess it was a combination of normal holiday depression with some things that happened over the holidays that triggered it, but regardless of the cause, it lasted for well over a month before it started getting better.  The end result of it though is that I’ve gotten way behind on my e-mails and I’ve let a lot of other things slide that I shouldn’t have, and that I now need to try to dig my way out of so I can see some light and relax again.  Part of getting buried like that is that your depression becomes compounded with the fact that you know you’re not living up to your responsibilities.  Then there’s a sense of shame that creeps in, and the longer you let things go, the harder they become to go back to.  Anyone who’s experienced depression is very well aware of these feelings, and that feeling of getting buried under the things you let lag while you’re going through it.  The rest of you, at least those of an empathetic nature, I’m sure can imagine what it’s like.

So, I’m making a step right here to get back to things.  I haven’t made a blog post in a very long time, so I thought it would be a good way to make a little forward progress in motivating myself to do other things as well.  First things first.  Now that the magazine’s done, I need to get caught up on e-mails, and then I have some house cleaning to do.  Fun times huh?

I’m not sure what I was really intending to write here, but now that I’ve actually started writing, I’ve completely blanked.  I was just thinking however, that even during my most depressive of times, the one thing I treasured above all others was losing myself in a good book.  I’m really disheartened by the ever growing library of e-books and e-readers out there.  While it’s great in the sense that it gives you access to massive libraries of the written word, what’s lost, at least in my opinion, far outweighs the benefits.  You lose that ability to hold something real in your hands, and to feel the paper under your fingers as you go from one page to the next.  A book doesn’t need batteries or an AC adapter to enjoy it.  You can view it from any angle, and if the sun shines on it, there’s no reflection to blind you or obscure the text.  You can take a book anywhere, and read it anytime, and the images it creates in your mind combined with the tactile stimulus you feel as you pass slowly from page to page, combine to create a world where you can lose yourself in your own imagination, forgetting all of your problems and responsibilities, even if just for a little while.

I’ve always been an intense reader.  Often I would start on a book and literally read almost straight for twelve to eighteen hours or more until I had read it from cover to cover.  Sometimes it would be a longer book, so I’d sleep in between, wake up, shower, and then pick up right where I left off until it was finished.  Reading, for me, is the ultimate form of escapism.  When you read, you see everything in your mind, and what you’re seeing is unique to you and your own imagination.  No one else in the world will see everything exactly as you do, which means that you’ve created something unique to yourself that no one else can experience or intrude upon.  In those moments, nothing else exists except that world you’re seeing within yourself.  There’s nothing better than that.  I do have responsibilities to catch up on today, but after talking about all this, I think it can all wait just a bit longer.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book.  Far too long in fact.  Life it to short to not spend it doing things that you love, and reading has always been one of the greatest loves of my life.  In fact, I think that’s exactly what I’m going to spend the rest of my morning doing.  Now I just need to figure out which world of imagination I want to lose myself in this time.

I will try to post more often.  I’m really going to try to make an effort to re-discover my love of various things that life has unfortunately stolen from me.

The January issue is up and running.  Hope you all enjoy it!  I’ll do a new blog post here soon as well.

http://www.roguecinema.com

It’s a huge issue this month.  You can check out all the goodness right here. – http://www.roguecinema.com

I’d like all of you media companies and distributors out there to tell me something.  Why should the consumer purchase your blu-ray products when you’re loading it down with so many protections and encryption schemes that they have to update their firmware on their players to even play some of the discs?  That means that the consumer is at the mercy of their player manufacturer’s ability to constantly produce new firmware, plus they have to hope that the updates will fix whatever’s causing their disc not to play, and if it doesn’t, it could be a month or more before the next firmware comes out.  Why should any consumer be expected to buy your movies if they won’t even be able to play them?

Case in point.  I was recently sent a copy of the new blu-ray release of Helldriver to review.  I put the disc in my standalone Samsung blu-ray player in the living room and tried to play it.  The laser in the player was going nuts, grinding away back and forth, while the video and audio kept pausing while the laser would try to re-sync itself.  Once I got into the movie itself, it played to a point, but every once in a while it would stop, re-sync and start again, and sometimes the audio would get out of sync and I’d have to stop it all together and then hit play again to get it to sync back up.  Then I figured, ok I’ll take it in and play it on the computer instead.  Of course the computer wouldn’t have a problem with playing it, right?  Wrong!  The computer was actually worse.  The video came up completely thrashed and blocky and the audio was jerky and stuttering.  At this point I figured, ok, I’ll contact the company and tell them I have a defective disc, as that’s all I could think it could be at that point, and in fact, it apparently was defective to some degree.  They sent me a replacement, which now appears to play ok in the standalone player, even though I do hear the laser scanning around before the menu, and I haven’t really tried to watch the full film yet.  So I figured, ok, this is a good copy.  I had done a firmware update between trying the old copy and the new one, so just to confirm it wasn’t a firmware issue, I tried to play the old one again.  It still had the same issues as before.  Ok, good.  Being a conscientious individual, I’d have felt bad if I had asked for a new copy when all I needed was a firmware update.  As it turns out, the original copy actually does have something wrong with it.

At this point, I took the new copy in and tried to play it on the computer.  Same issue as before with the bad copy.  It came up with garbled video and audio and played very haltingly, even freezing up PowerDVD 11 for various lengths of time.  Mind you, I have the latest codecs installed and the current version of PowerDVD, which plays other blu-ray discs just fine.  So what’s the problem here?  I don’t know what the problem is honestly.  I don’t know if it’s some funky new protection or encryption scheme they’re using or what, but that’s not the point.  The point is that I, as an end user, shouldn’t even have to think twice about it.  I should just be able to pop the disc in and have it play.  End of story, full stop.  When I have to worry about firmware updates, software player compatibility and other issues, it makes me not even want to own the product, much less blu-ray in general.  I can pop in DVDs and they work just fine with no problems or player issues whatsoever.  Why should an end user have to struggle to watch a film on blu-ray that they could just as easily watch on DVD with no problems, often for less money?

So to all you media companies out there struggling to come up with new protections and encryption schemes, I’m telling you all right now, stop it, or you’re going to kill any chance blu-ray has of gaining wider acceptance.  These schemes will be defeated by software, regardless of what you come out with, and it’s only making things harder and far more frustrating for the consumer, when all they want to do is to sit down, watch a film and relax without having to troubleshoot why this $25 disc they just purchased of their favorite new release won’t play properly in their player.

If you agree, or if you have blu-ray and have had to deal with issues like this, please feel free to comment here, and to write to the companies that produce these problematic releases.  The consumers need to be heard.

Hey folks,

The November issue of Rogue Cinema is now fully posted.  Here’s what we have for you this month!

Interviews:

Brooks Hunter

This Month’s Sleepover Girl:

Lisa Di Cappa has an enthusiasm that’s absolutely infectious.  I deal with a lot of people, but I absolutely love dealing with people like Lisa.  You can tell she absolutely loves what she does and really enjoys being involved in the industry.  This month, it’s my absolute pleasure to present our readers with this Italian-Canadian beauty.  Check out her feature to find out what makes her so aweome, and then all you film makers out there, make it a point to find a part for her in your next film! Thanks Lisa!

Articles:

Who Killed Teddy Bear?  Beats me, but I have the feeling Juliet Prowse and Sal Mineo were involved.  Poor Teddy.   Anyway, if you really want to know who killed teddy bear, check out Phil Smolen’s latest article all about this 1965 sleaze fest and find out.

Of Human Bondage sounds like it would be a kinky movie, but it’s really more about bondage of the heart, and being obsessed with someone you can’t have, no matter how cruel they are to you.  Sad really, but this month Jason S. Lockard decided to use his Classic Cinema article to depress the hell out of us by looking at a film that reminds us all of that one love we had that was never returned.  Thanks a lot Jason!

Phil Smolen takes a look back at the 1955 MGM film, Bad Day at Black Rock, starring a who’s who list of Hollywood greats.

It’s almost Thanksgiving again, and every year around this time, Danny Runion gets to thinking about what Thanksgiving dinner would be like when all the horror icons get together for a meal.  So here’s how he thinks it would be.

Plus reviews of:

- 13 – A Cult Influence
- Argyle
- Bad is Bad
- Bite Marks
- Captain America / Captain America II: Death Too Soon
- Dirty Pictures
- Downward
- Elysian
- Emasculation
- Girl./Girl. Scene
- Karma Touches Everyone
- Kenneyville
- Lost
- My Favorite Movie
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 Volume XXII
- Nazi Hunters
- Plastic – Returning the Screw
- Seoul Nights
- Stigma
- Thankskilling
- The Depression of Detective Downs 1 & 2
- The Inspector General
- The Woman
- Who’d Have Thought?
- Wingman Class
- Without a Home
- Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings
- Xtraction

Book Review:

- Abel Ferrara: The King of New York

So head on over to Rogue Cinema (http://www.roguecinema.com) and check out all the goodness in this month’s issue.

Hope you all enjoy it!

I used to like Herman Cain.  I thought he was a good, intelligent and sincere man who cared about getting this country back on its feet, but I see now that I was mistaken.  So what changed my mind about him?  Well, here’s a list…

1. He has no foreign policy knowledge or experience whatsoever, and seems to stumble on even the simplest of foreign policy issues.  A man who isn’t truly aware of what’s going on in the world has no business even running for the office of president.  You have to know what kinds of people we’re dealing with, understand history, understand the mindset of different cultures and have some clue as to how to deal with foreign policy issues.  He has none of those, and nor does our current muslim-loving, apologist in chief who has caused serious damage between us and our allies, and has done dramatic damage to our relationship with Israel.  We don’t need another foreign policy idiot in the White House.

2. His 9-9-9 plan started out as a 9-9-9 plan, and now it’s got exceptions and he keeps changing things around, and this was a plan that was supposedly come up with by the best economists he could find.  If that’s the kind of people he surrounds himself with, then once again, he has no business being president.  We have enough of that crap going on with the current one.  This plan, in any case, leaves a gaping hole for government to continue to raise our taxes while at the same time wasting countless billions, and even trillions of dollars in taxpayer money.

3. His recent comments about abortion and gay marriage.  I was impressed that, even though he was once a minister, he had left social issues out of his campaign.  This is as it should be.  By their very nature, social issues are social, and government has no business sticking its nose in them whatsoever.  Now he’s taken the utterly moronic position that he’s against abortion in ALL circumstances and against gay marriage and would sign constitutional amendments to ban both.  Seriously, this complete lack of respect for our constitution, and his willingness to subvert its grand plan to accommodate the drooling masses of religious idiots in this country, is the very same reason I pulled my support from Bachmann.  WE DO NOT, NOR SHOULD WE EVER LIVE IN A THEOCRACY, NOR SHOULD WE ASPIRE TO!  Yet, that is what we’ll be left with should the brainwashed masses get their way.  We all have to live in this country.  Abortion is a personal issue that no one has any business whatsoever sticking their nose into.  I don’t give two squats if your idiotic religion tells you that life begins at conception.  It doesn’t.  Cell division begins at conception, and until that fetus is capable of actually thinking, it’s nothing but a collection of cells.  Don’t even get me started on the whole moronic stem-cell and respecting the sanctity of life crap.  Gay marriage is again a personal issue.  No one has ANY right to tell someone who they can love or spend their life with, much less the government.  Gays pay taxes, work in our society, and even serve in the military.  They’re just like the rest of us.  They’re Americans, living in the same cities and towns, obeying the same laws, and are governed by the same constitution, that should NEVER be corrupted by the societal whims of a religious majority.  That would be nationalized discrimination, much as it would be if all of a sudden all the white people in this country decided that all black people should be slaves again and got a constitutional amendment passed saying that slavery was once again legal.

So who’s left?

I pulled my support from Bachmann for her theocratic stand on social issues, and it sickens me that she claims to represent the Tea Party, which was never about social issues at all.  I did support Gary Johnson for a while, until his comments after we killed Osama Bin Laden.  Ron Paul is a crazy ass old goat who would totally screw our relationships with our allies, Rick Perry is another moronic theocrat, and Newt Gingrich is too blinded by religion and has too many skeletons in his closet (i.e. adultery and ethics violations) to be president.

That leaves me with one choice – Mitt Romney.  Would he have been my first choice?  No way in hell, but I would vote for him a million times over that big eared, utterly corrupt, undeniably inept, lying and narcissistic turd we have in office right now.

People in politics are too filtered to really tell it like it is.  I’m not in politics, so I’ll say whatever the hell I think, and if they don’t like it, then too bad.  That goes for anyone who doesn’t like what I just said.  There’s been enough political correctness in this country.  It’s time to call a spade a spade, and these people need to be called out on their BS.

Hell, maybe I should run for office.  People need a good bitch slap of reality once in a while, and they’re sure as hell not getting it from any of our current crop of special interest owned douche bags.  When you care more about getting re-elected and raising campaign money than you do about telling the truth and doing what’s best for this country and our people, and upholding the constitution that you’ve sworn to uphold, then you have NO business being in office.  Period.

Ok, that’s my rant for the night.  I’m just sickened by this whole thing.  Last time we had that idiot McCain running because it was “his turn”, and now we have a crop of people running that remind me more of something that should be scraped off my shoe after a walk in the park than of anyone who should be holding elective office, much less the presidency.

Ok, my little bitch session is over.  Feels good to unload once in a while.  I have some other stuff going on, but I’ll save that for another post.

Yeah I know, it’s been a hell of a long time since my last post.  I’ve had a whole lot of stuff going on in my personal life that’s been keeping me busy and I haven’t really had anything that inspired me to sit down and write about it.  Then today…I saw it.

Today…well, yesterday now, was Columbus Day.  This day has different meanings for different people.  Here are a few…

• The lazy ass bankers and government employees get a day off.
• The snotty liberals get to whine and post their snide comments about how we stole land from the Indians.
• Some people appreciate and remember Columbus for his exploits as an explorer.
• Some people wonder why they didn’t get any damn mail, and then someone reminds them that it’s Columbus Day.
• Some people watch TV, fart and scratch themselves while pondering the meaning of existence.

So what got me irritated was that a liberal acquaintance of mine on Facebook shared an image that said, “Let’s celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone else’s house and telling them that we live there now.”

Now this got me to thinking.  What would this country look like right now if the Europeans had never come over to colonize it?  Cast your mind for a moment and think about that.  You don’t really have to, because you can see it if you look at the state of present day Indian reservations and the conditions their people live in.  They were given massive amounts of land, and the only people that really seem to prosper are those that are involved in the Indian casinos and the tribal organizations that have been sucking the tit of the US government for well over a century, if not longer.  They had all that land, but what did they do with it?  Industry?  Not really.  Higher centers of learning?  Again, not so much.  Advancements in science?  I guess if you consider getting drunk and blacking out “alcohol research”, you could make that stretch.  Other than that, not really.

Now, let’s look at what the US has given the world because it was settled and things happened the way they did.  Innovations in virtually every field known to man, advancements in medicine, science, agriculture, construction, communications, travel, etc….  What was the one huge thing that we did for the world?  I mean, the biggest thing this country has done for mankind?  We were a major player in defeating Adolph Hitler, who unchecked and without our help in stopping him, would not only have conquered the world, including the Indians, but he would have wiped the Jewish people as well as homosexuals, blacks and numerous other races, right off the face of the Earth.

So the next time you hear someone whining about Columbus Day and how unfair the colonization of America was to the Indians, maybe you should remind them that if it wasn’t for that, then very likely there wouldn’t be any Indians here right now to bitch about it.

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Now, on to a different subject.  My burnout had become so overwhelming that I really needed a break from things, and for something different to happen in my personal life.  That change came when a friend of mine came and stayed with us for a few weeks.  Not only did we go to the Def Leppard concert, which was awesome as hell (front row seats baby!!!), but we started playing a whole lot of pool together.  I have always loved pool, but I hadn’t played seriously in quite some time.  We made it an almost daily thing, and he even bought us each our own stick, which was awesome.  Well, he’s gone now, but several good things came of that.  First, my wife got really into playing as well, and I bought her her own stick, which she absolutely loves.  Second, while we were playing at the place we played pool at, we were served one day by this SUPER nice girl named Melanie.  We kept going back there for a long time after and became regulars, and also became more and more friendly with Melanie.  Now she doesn’t work there any more, but my wife and I just went out with Melanie and her husband Sunday night to play pool, and we had a phenomenal time!  She’s also an excellent singer, so I talked to her about putting something together musically and she was really up for it, so hopefully we’ll get that going.  More exciting though, is that after eleven years of living here, we’ve actually met some really nice people we can be friends with.  Meeting new friends is damn near impossible once you’re an adult.  People are so wrapped up in their own lives, problems, kids, etc…, that they generally aren’t too interested in adding new friends to their circle.  Plus, it’s just generally hard to meet good people that you really hit it off with.  So we’re really happy we met Melanie, and her husband is also a super nice guy that we both like a lot.  So hopefully things will continue to progress and we’ll actually have some new friends.

I’ve also gotten back to weight lifting.  I hadn’t done it in a long time, and it really showed.  I had gotten soft, my joints hurt when I walked, etc….  Now I’m tightened up again and getting bigger and harder every day.  It feels great to be back to my old self again.  I still need to lose a bunch of weight, but my muscle structure is coming back to what it was and I’m feeling awesome.  Between that, new friends and new activities, I’m actually feeling less burned out, so hopefully this trend will continue.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I’ll try to post more often.